The Internet's Political Voices Are Lining Up To Smash CISPA

Supporters of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act be warned: The fight against CISPA is shaping up, and the Internet has definitively taken the other side.

On Monday, a group of more than fifty professors, entrepreneurs and information security professionals published an open letter to Congress calling on lawmakers to oppose CISPA and other overbroad cybersecurity bills like the SECURE IT Act, writing that the bills "are drafted to allow entities who participate in relaying or receiving Internet traffic to freely monitor and redistribute those network communications."

The group, which includes professors and fellows from Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State, Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and others, echos the criticisms of groups like the ACLU, the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, which have all expressed concerns that CISPA as it's currently drafted would allow companies to hand over users' private data to government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security without oversight.

The bill, which is expected to be voted on in the House on Friday, is designed to allow the sharing of threat data between the public and private sector to prevent digital attacks. But as it's currently written, according to the open letter, CISPA and similar bills would

...nullify current legal protections against wiretapping and similar civil liberties violations for that kind of broad data sharing. By encouraging the transfer of users' private communications to US Federal agencies, and lacking good public accountability or transparency, these “cybersecurity” bills unnecessarily trade our civil liberties for the promise of improved network security.

CISPA has a very different focus from SOPA and PIPA, the much-loathed antipiracy bills killed by a similar groundswell of Internet anger in February. Whereas SOPA and PIPA raised fears of censorship, CISPA's vague data-sharing statutes are largely seen as a threat to privacy, although some are also interpreting the bill as allowing site blocking. And whereas SOPA pitted Silicon Valley against Hollywood, CISPA seems to have the support of many technology and Web-based companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Symantec and IBM.

Google and many other Web companies have yet to publicly state their opposition or support for the bill. Given how effectively Internet activists boycotted and pilloried supporters of SOPA and PIPA earlier this year--and how quickly the backlash against CISPA is forming--they should choose their side wisely.